Thought I would test out Jing to create my first screencast. The star of my show is, of course, Drupal and the helper is Komodo. Alright, it's more about Komodo but it's a trick to view variables available for theming for a Drupal page. I find this to be very useful!

I was looking for a good tutorial to try and master the art of creating good web 2.0 buttons. Well my search landed me on the iris design website which has a really good step by step procedure of how to create these cool buttons. The tutorial titled Web 2.0 style buttons has enabled me to add a little web 2.0 flair to this site in way of a taxonomy container and list item bullets that you will find to the left of my blog titles and to the left of any list items.

I have been wanting to add a gallery program to my site so I thought I would try out the gallery module. This module relies on an installation of the gallery2 which I have used many times in the past.

In addition to the module I thought I would change my site theme. I forget which theme I started with but I basically removed all the guts and started from scratch. It's not completely finished and will probably be a work in progress for a long time!

So, I really wanted to try and get into the world of testing patches in order to help get Drupal 6 to the next beta stage but I was in a world of unknown. The root of the problem was the procedure that was needed in order to apply a patch to a file or group of files. See, I am using a windows machine and by default the Linux bash commands are not available. The patch procedures were showing “patch filename < patchname” and this was not going to work on my machine.

I am not sure if this is a trap to catch the guys that took the laptop from this little brewery but I have noticed that if you put the right bait in a mousetrap, you always get the mouse. But if the reward is beer, I could only guess the number of mice that would show up.

Lost laptop reward: Beer for life - Read full story for latest details.

So I finally got around to creating the central eastern Pennsylvanian Drupal group group in hopes of connecting with like minded individuals that are closer to where I live. I know a few people that have access to the NYC, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Toronto group meet-ups but those groups are just a little far for me travel to on a regular basis.

So there are probably a lot of people out there that want to know what you can do in order to make yourself a better Drupal developer. We if you are like me then the first step is to start yourself a huge Drupal project that should have at least 3 or 4 developers but only has 2. Then, one day have one of of those two developers come into work to let you know that they are leaving for a Drupal Job in Manhattan working for Sony. :) (you know who you are). I'll tell you what, you learn to find as many resources as you possibly can in order to breathe, eat and sleep Drupal.

Found this story on lifehacker and the first comment made me laugh out loud.

How To: Overcome Shyness - Weblog Pick the Brain suggests that you overcome your bashful obstacles by focusing on your assets as a contributing member of society. The author reminds the shy set that most people, after all, are...Tamar Weinberg [Shawn's Shared]

I have to give a plug to a online game that I was playing when I needed a break from working on Drupal Websites. The name of the game is Desktop Tower Defense. Desktop Tower Defense is much like the Warcraft tower defense games but build into a "little" flash game. You use different towers to battle off one or two lines of "innovators" and stopping them from geting from one side of the board to the other. It's a great stress relief after a hard session of working. See if you can beat my score of 7650 on version 1.5 on hard mode.

Today I received my new headphones by Shure. I didn't purchase these this time but sent in a EC2 headphone which had a wire short that made the sound crackle when I moved my head. Up until that point, I found these headphones to be fantastic. After finding my receipt, I sent in my headphones following the instructions on the Shure Service & Warranty page. To my amazement, they didn't get replaced in the expected 2 to 4 weeks but in a matter of days. Chalk one up to customer service at the Shure company.